Q&AGhostery Rules [Split Thread]

Level 1

Third-party filters, yes. However, some extensions like Ghostery have their own rules. Every now and then, ghostery blocks a site/tracker that ublock origin misses, doesn't happen often but it happens. Also, if ublock origin is breaking a site completely, and there are like 1 billion scripts (this in the

red rectangle -

) on the site, and I don't have the time to turn off and on every single script until I find the ones breaking the site, I'll just press the big blue shutdown button to turn off ublock origin completely for that site so I can view it immediately when I'm in a hurry, while Ghostery still blocks the important trackers and ads, it might miss some here and there that ublock origin wouldn't, but without Ghostery, turning ublock origin off completely for a given site will allow all of its ads and trackers and so on to load, as if the fact that Ghostery also finds a script here and there on top of ublock origin wasn't a good enough reason to use it. I haven't had the time yet to test other extensions like Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Privacy Possum, Ultrablock etc. (you can find a billion of those in the chrome web store if you start searching)

Level 25

You're comparing apples with pears, my mate. Ghostery wasn't born as an ad-blocker, and despite it blocks some ads it's focused on privacy, it's the Disconnect kind of extension. I do not criticize, actually I promote using it. I see no harm in using ad blocker - privacy protection, just as I recommended above (AdGuard and Disconnect). The issue begins when end-users believe that with installing uBlock + AdGuard + AdBlock they will get better results, when actually 98% of ads will be covered by one of them and the rest will just be there laying on your RAM and injecting every site, giving you a general speed slowdown.

Level 24

Better results would be to use Ublock w/ filterlist(s) that work + Ghostery + something like NanoDefender + Decentraleyes. It's sometimes not always about the advertising content. So I agree with RoboMan based off my opinion here.

Level 40

You're comparing apples with pears, my mate. Ghostery wasn't born as an ad-blocker, and despite it blocks some ads it's focused on privacy, it's the Disconnect kind of extension. I do not criticize, actually I promote using it. I see no harm in using ad blocker - privacy protection, just as I recommended above (AdGuard and Disconnect). The issue begins when end-users believe that with installing uBlock + AdGuard + AdBlock they will get better results, when actually 98% of ads will be covered by one of them and the rest will just be there laying on your RAM and injecting every site, giving you a general speed slowdown.

why combining them? 1 ublock alone is enough if you add good anti-tracking filters to it
even better than combing those 3
ghostery+disconnect now are not comparable to my ublock with customs filters. Almost nothing ublock can't block

Level 1

why combining them? 1 ublock alone is enough if you add good anti-tracking filters to it
even better than combing those 3
ghostery+disconnect now are not comparable to my ublock with customs filters. Almost nothing ublock can't block

Level 40

I feel this is enough for me. Of course I can add more but I'm afraid they would slow down my browser
besides those filters I copied from below, I added hphosts ad&tracking (just for testing) or notrack filter

AdZ hosts, despite having a huge database, it's nowhere near the effectiveness of stevenblack and 1hosts (~40-50%)

Level 1

I feel this is enough for me. Of course I can add more but I'm afraid they would slow down my browser
besides those filters I copied from below, I added hphosts ad&tracking (just for testing) or notrack filter

AdZ hosts, despite having a huge database, it's nowhere near the effectiveness of stevenblack and 1hosts

I went to filterlists.com and picked only the ones that were updated in the last 1 week ( you can sort by that), while also carefully checking what those filters do and what they are for (some people "update" filters by changing a symbol or two, so the filters may be months old but they'll appear as new to filterlists.com's sorting thing). I'm pretty sure a million filters are much better than 200k for example, I don't have evidence and I haven't done tests in big samples, but what you're saying is, that because you did a test with 20 samples, which is hilariously low, that means more filters are mostly worthless, which I doubt is the case. Besides, 5% is not a small number (it's not 5%!!!). And I haven't had a performance slowdown at all, if anything it's faster cuz more filters. I do see page breakage from time to time but not often, it's not rare but it's not often either, "here and there" would be the best description to how often

LOL no internet slowdown at all? I pretty much find malware/spyware filters useless. Nothing your security solution can't deal with, or in case you don't have one,, a security extension which will give, IMO, a much better result. Just my opinion here, but you can give me a better insight on malware filters, long time no using. Do they work?

Level 40

I went to filterlists.com and picked only the ones that were updated in the last 1 week ( you can sort by that), while also carefully checking what those filters do and what they are for (some people "update" filters by changing a symbol or two, so the filters may be months old but they'll appear as new to filterlists.com's sorting thing). I'm pretty sure a million filters are much better than 200k for example, I don't have evidence and I haven't done tests in big samples, but what you're saying is, that because you did a test with 20 samples, which is hilariously low, that means more filters are mostly worthless, which I doubt is the case. Besides, 5% is not a small number (it's not 5%!!!). And I haven't had a performance slowdown at all, if anything it's faster cuz more filters. I do see page breakage from time to time but not often, it's not rare but it's not often either, "here and there" would be the best description to how often

20 samples because I spent 30 mins to extract them from malicious documents (zero to 2 day old, not from vxvault or malc0de (which are usually a few days old)
I used to use vxvault/malc0de links (40-50 live links) but I found most vendors/filters had signatures for it
I switched to extracted links and guess what, many vendors struggled

I used to do a lot of tests on adblocking, off-screen, not published on some random websites in different languages
I found those 200k filters were sufficient enough though they might miss few ads/trackers
don't forget there are many many generic rules, which don't depend on specific domains

it depends on many factors, including what websites you visit everyday and what you don't
for example, hphosts+stevenblack+1hosts+notrack+AdZ,... combined, they failed to block a lot of ads in my country while a simple hosts (<700 rules) can block almost all ads in my country

adversity+adversity extreme+adguard's english filter+blockzilla+jabcreations+... they have a lot of generic rules, that are much more effective than other filters despite being small
I felt significant lag while browsing with +600k filters. It might be less noticeable for you because your PC is probably faster than mine

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